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Environmental exposure more than plastic composition shapes marine microplastic‐associated bacterial communities in Pacific versus Caribbean field incubations
Summary
Researchers incubated six types of household plastic polymers in Pacific and Caribbean coastal waters to study the bacterial communities that form on microplastics. They found that geographic location and exposure time were far more important than plastic type in shaping these microbial communities. The study identified a core plastisphere of 57 bacterial variants common across all conditions, suggesting environmental context plays a bigger role than plastic composition in microplastic colonization.
Microplastics have arisen as a global threat to marine ecosystems. In this study, we explored the role that plastic polymer type, incubation time and geographic location have on shaping the microbial community adhered to the microplastics, termed the plastisphere. We performed detailed bacterial plastisphere community analyses on microplastics of six different household plastic polymers, serving as proxies of secondary microplastics, incubated for 6 weeks in coastal Pacific waters. These bacterial communities were compared to the plastisphere communities grown on identical microplastic particles incubated in the coastal Caribbean Sea at Bocas del Toro, Panama. Ribosomal gene sequencing analyses revealed that bacterial community composition did not exhibit a significant preference for plastic type at either site but was instead driven by the incubation time and geographic location. We identified a 'core plastisphere' composed of 57 amplicon sequence variants common to all plastic types, incubation times and locations, with possible synergies between taxa. This study contributes to our understanding of the importance of geography in addition to exposure time, in the composition of the plastisphere.
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